A trip to Brum
Prop Views was up at Tory Conference and had a chance to gauge the slightly muted mood music as the Tories seek life after Government. Jay Morton’s recent piece covered Labour which was altogether a more public housing focused affair with a nudge towards a return to state house building. The Conservative conference attempted to look the other way – what are the levers to get the private sector building it asked.
What’s on offer?
On the face of it there is some good stuff. There’s a pledge to take £50k off the cost of a home through removing stat costs such as net zero. But no mention here of second stairwells. I actually think you could go further and I am working with chums on exploring how we do this.
Building Safety and other naughty Quangos
As the conference wore on, more and more delegates piled in on the disaster which is the Building Safety Act. In my view it’s now only a matter before this gets revisited. It’s becoming more and more common for it to get raised and for it to then get criticised. The country simply will not be able to build scalable high density homes if this legislation is not amended.
There’s also a reboot of the infrastructure levy. An all tax rather than the seven or eight tariffs the developer currently has to fork out for.
Natural England is going to get ray gunned. The Hinkley fish jacuzzi got a mention as did the nutrient no go prohibition which Prop Views covered some time ago. The Environment Agency is also in trouble although it wasn’t scape goated for any particular misdemeanour.
A fringe affair
To the fringes where the real action was taking place. I participated in a Cratus fringe on brownfield first. The Conservative party’s challenge as always is being pro-development whilst also not falling into the trap of developer bashing and banging on about the green belt which does need to take some housing also.
At the fringe, there was a lot of negative sentiment about grey belt and developers “reneging on their promises” even from one Shadow Minister. I gave this short shrift reminding everyone of the regulatory escalation that drove UK house building into collapse. And like a bad boomerang land banking appeared. It was also quickly dispatched.
There’s a lot of hokus pokus about developers and house building that circulates around these conferences. It’s not just a tory thing. We really must as a sector be more forthright about how development works and more of us at the coal face need to be present. A lot of politicians and the general public simply don’t always fully grasp economic drivers and the costs of well meaning regulation. Readers won’t be surprised to learn I dropped some fairly weighty truth bombs and the MPs and delegates did respond well to a tonic of rational economic thought processes.
Notable other fringes were listening to Andy Street talk about Mayoral powers. So interesting and I will write a follow up on this. The London fringe was also great from the Centre for Policy Studies and I made it to the second half of the Planning Futures/Vistry panel on getting more housing built. Andrew Taylor from Vistry had managed four conferences – a star! All were insightful and lots of positive noises were being made. With conference season over and me telling myself never again, I was left with the feeling that if only we could pick n’mix from all the main parities we could potentially have something that would get house building going again.
Brownfield emergency
A final word on London’s brownfield emergency. When you go to these conferences you get perspective. I often find myself hobnobbing with London politicians but these conferences are opportunities to speak to Councils further afield. There were plenty of Greater South East leaders and members in attendance. And they are not happy about what they perceive to be London under planning. The Draft Plan undershoots the standard method calculation by some distance and there is a feeling that London is exporting its housing need into grey belt and surrounding settlements. It does feel like an outbreak of housing border disputes is coming down the track. Keep an eye out.
